


Mystery of the Limebloods

by SMJB



Series: Forewarned Canon [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society (Homestuck), Gen, Mystery, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 10,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: In the pocket dimension that was created in chapter 3 ofForewarned, the first limeblood in generations is born. Their entire life, there has been one burning question they've needed to know the answer to: why was their caste exterminated by the Alternian Empire? This is the story of their quest for knowledge.
Relationships: Original Character/Original Character
Series: Forewarned Canon [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1529768
Comments: 9
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ _Forewarned_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215771) is required reading for context as to, well, just what universe this story takes place in. Contains spoilers for [_Duty is Heavier than a Hammer_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21551440). You don’t have to read [_Tavros Takes a Stand_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21990571), but it’s quite good and I recommend it. Also, I'm doing something different with this one where each scene is its own chapter, which means the chapter lengths will vary considerably.

An egg sits in a niche in a system of brooding caverns beneath Alternia’s surface. It begins to wiggle and crack. It just so happens that today, the 12th bilunar perigee of the 6th dark season’s equinox of what would have been the 5201st sweep of Her Imperious Condescension’s rule if Her Imperious Condescension still reigned--fuck it, the date is 5201/21/12--is the day that this grub hatches. Though it was this exact moment that they were given life, it’s only in, oh, about 20-30 minutes that they will be given a name by a supercomputer after examining your DNA, the color of your carapace, and the shape of their horns (Peixes-straight until the top, where the right one makes a 180-degree curve around a fist-sized diameter and comes halfway down again).

Had they hatched in the Alpha Timeline (and another version of them might have been, for all we know), they’d have been proper fucked. For one thing, 5201/21/12 is the exact date that twelve trolls started playing SGRUB. Even had they been born significantly earlier than this, though, they’d have been fucked, for this is the first limeblood to hatch since...well, it’s really impossible to say; records from before the Earth War are only slowly being recovered, since the only way to stop the Imperial Drones from continuing to cull people was to shut the whole system down.

As I said, this is not the alpha timeline--but as you might have discerned from the impossible presence of Earth in this...to call it a universe would be generous...neither is it a doomed timeline, per se. Somewhere out there Karkat Vantas and John Egbert are both celebrating birthdays and being blissfully unaware of the unwitting part other versions of themselves are playing this very bilunar perigee in the destruction of their universes and hence the accidental and incidental creation of this pocket dimension ([it’s a whole thing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215771/chapters/50682398))--but who cares about those shlubs? It’s not their story, damn it. 

The point is that when the attendant (a jadeblood, because there’s a difference between knowing that societal roles are bad and actually shirking them) sees this grub, she does gasp, but rather than thinking of their inevitable culling (whether pityingly or approvingly) she thinks of sending them to Earth. Not so much because of the danger, though Alternia is still by and large a lawless place and old bigotries run deep, but because she’s pretty sure lime lusae are extinct and so the grub is going to need to be adopted by a human.

But before this grub can be sent to Earth, they’re going to need a name.

What will the name of this young grub be?

>HAYDEN KELVIN

Your name is HAYDEN and you’ve only just HATCHED. You are thus FAR TOO YOUNG to have developed any INTERESTS at all. The computer that has given you your name has also given you a SIGN:

No one’s ever been quite sure what those symbols in the lower left hand corner of the display mean. You don’t know what _any_ of this means, however, so that’s not particularly significant for you.

This is where it is traditional to ask “What will you do?” but for the time being the answer is “Not much of anything.” Let’s check back in with you when you’re older and have developed some degree of independence.

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572726)


	2. Chapter 2

DR. ROYLOTT: The myth of lime bloods is comparable to that of witches in medieval Europe. A hidden subversive element within society, dedicated to taking it down with obscure and occult powers. The fact that trolls already have what are for all intents and purposes psychic powers makes the tale seem more plausible than it would otherwise, but it simply doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t the Alternian Empire have utilized such people--and if not, why did it take ten thousand years to finally wipe them out? 

INTERVIEWER: :V { So you don’t think there’s any chance that limebloods ever existed?

DR. ROYLOTT: There is a small outside chance that there did exist a bloodcaste that got exterminated, perhaps even ones with lime blood, but these are not the lime bloods of lore any more than the Minoan civilization is the Atlantis of lore.

INTERVIEWER: :V { Then why did they get exterminated?

DR. ROYLOTT: Why did the Nazis exterminate Jews, Romani, and millions of other people? Why did the Ottoman Empire exterminate Armenians? Why did Rwanda exterminate Tutsi, Twa, and moderate Hutu? Why did America and Canada exterminate the First Nations peoples? There is never a logical reason for genocide--you can’t rationally explain an inherently irrational act.

You pause the video. Roylott’s theory has since been largely discredited by, well, your birth, but you think there might be some truth to parts of it. Certainly you’ve spent much of your childhood attempting to manifest all sorts of powers your kind is supposed to possess and spectacularly failing to do so every time.

(It doesn’t strike you as being odd in the least that the top Alternian historiographers are all humans; they tend to be the top experts in most fields, due to the fact that science wasn’t really a thing on Alternia. That’s been turning around, of course, but humans had a head start.)

It could easily be as simple as he says. Perhaps--indeed, probably--there was no especial reason for your extermination beyond the paranoia of a fascist regime.

But that’s not what your gut says. From the moment you learned that your white hair (that you currently dye black) and your lime blood were unusual you’ve read everything you could about limebloods, and as contradictory all those accounts are they have you convinced that whatever limebloods were, they could _not_ be reasonably described as _mundane_.

Regardless, however well reasoned all this conjecture is, it’s nothing more than that: conjecture. Guesswork. Of no greater veracity than the folklore passed down by dozens of generations of troll kids. You can never be satisfied by this _storytelling_ \--you need to know the _truth_.

There comes a knock on your bedroom door:

ALICE: heyden! are you coming down for breakfast or wot?

HAYDEN: Coming, Mom!

You reluctantly stash your phone away in your sylladex (you use a ranked modus--new items are slotted into your queue in alphabetical order, and when you try to overfill it the item at the front falls out), get dressed, and leave your room. You descend the stairs into the living room.

VARIOUS: Surprise!!!

Startled, you stare dumbly at the cake for a second. “Happy 13th Birthday!” it says. Oh, yeah; today _is_ April 13th, 2022, isn’t it? Usually the personal holiday is heralded by [Neil banging out the tunes](https://www.tumblr.com/search/neil+banging+out+the+tunes), which you must have missed because you’ve been watching old science lectures and interviews instead of being on social media today. Surrounded by your adoptive family, you blow out the candles.

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572765)


	3. Chapter 3

(DR. LALONDE): aight look its like dis 

(DR. LALONDE): we got sum ppl who arroved from anoher...place, an as much as id LOVE 2 tell u peeps all about it.......theyre miners 

(DR. LALONDE): we cant go round ruinin what little chance theyve got of havin a normal-is remainder of their childhood! frankly the ONLY reason were having this press conference is bcuz some of deze kids are very obvs not human or troll, so the journos of the world need 2 know why if their kids come home talkin bout the new green skinned kid @ skool or whatever theyre not allowed 2 break the story 

(DR. LALONDE): that makes things real awkward bcus were leanin a LOT o shit from them bout a lotta things but its all tied up in their personal histories an shit in ways that make it next to impossible for us to publish anything of note about it either which believe me is jus as frustratin for us as it is 4 u 

(DR. LALONDE): basically the same rules apply as wen those time travelers come back to fix shit plus the rules protecting that limeblood gurls privacy 

(DR. LALONDE): enny questions??? 

You pause the video; not that this wasn’t fascinating in its own right, but you’d mainly been curious as to why a press conference being held by the Hawking Initiative ended up in your “limeblood” feed. 

You text Dr. Lalonde: 

_Hayden Kelvin here. Just FYI, you misgendered me on national television: I’m nonbinary. I’m not blaming you for not having e%tensively detailed notes on my entire life or anything--just, well, now you know._

You continue on your way to school, where you’re waylaid by your friend Tereza Kocova. 

TEREZA: Hayden! Have you seen the Hawking Institute press conference? 

HAYDEN: Part of it. Why? 

TEREZA: Because there are nineteen new students in school--eight humans, seven trolls, and four...others. None of them have green skin, but I suppose it makes sense that Doc Lalonde wouldn’t exactly give out real information as part of a random example. 

TEREZA: Isn’t it amazing that they put them here? 

HAYDEN: Well, it makes sense; the district has e%perience protecting my privacy, after all. 

There have been a few encounters with paparazzi now and again, but the schools and local law enforcement have always been swift to deal with them. 

You spy a boy in aviators about your age consulting a phone he was using as a map. He spies you and comes over. 

TEREZA: That’s one of them! Play it cool. 

The boy addresses you: 

DAVE: youre tereza kocova right? 

HAYDEN: No. 

TEREZA: That would be me, actually. 

DAVE: so what youre telling me is that this marauders map app on this godphone tells me that two people named tereza kocova and hayden kelvin are standing in this corner and tereza is the human? come on that is the most troll-sounding name ive ever heard tell of 

TEREZA: It’s a perfectly normal name in the Czech Republic. 

DAVE: damn you the daughter of the ambassador or something 

TEREZA: My mom came to work at the Hawking Initiative when I was quite young. 

DAVE: aight all im saying is i literally know a troll named terezi so you cant really blame me for making the mistake 

DAVE: anyway i got this notification on this thing that said youd been creeping on me and my boy j--my friend john and i and recorded something and the thing is that im given to understand that thats “spying on the manhattan project” levels of illegal 

TEREZA: Dude, don’t worry about it. It’s just that Maryam has _already_ concocted a conspiracy theory that you’re a bunch of hybrids cooked up in a government lab and I wanted to prove to her that you actually come from another dimension. If I do anything untoward with it you can always call the cops. 

HAYDEN: Did you tell her that that’s literally impossible? Because that’s literally impossible. 

For one thing, while the final products were very similar to external inspection, trolls and humans went through extremely different developmental stages to get there, meaning even on the face of it splicing genes together would be like splicing lines from a cake recipe into a salad--most of the time you’d get shit like “preheat the oven to 425°” and end up accomplishing nothing because there’s no instruction to put the salad in the oven. What little hope there was that that sort of thing could be overcome was, however, dashed with the revelation that the “recipes” weren’t even written in the same language; Alternian and Earth biota both used DNA, but the schema by which they translated genetic instructions into proteins was completely different, meaning that if you plugged a troll genome into a human cell, what you would get is gibberish. 

DAVE: k but like hows that going to stop everyone in the world knowing who and where we are? even if you get the chair the damage will already be done 

TEREZA: I wouldn’t worry about that, there’s basically no way in hell you haven’t been rendered unsearchable. 

DAVE: k what the fuck is that like the mist from percy jackson or some shit 

HEYDEN: How do you not know these things and what’s with those prehistoric references? 

DAVE: look my world ended in 2009 and then i spent three years riding a meteorite without apple juice through the interdimensional void followed by a few months of trying to rebuild civilization while being told by what im still not sold was a true prophecy of the future that we fucking suck at it and now im here so maybe cut me some slack for not knowing everything there is to know about the cyberwizardry of your future tech ok like god damn have some mercy on the poor amish rube exiled from the aughts would you 

DAVE: but like never mind all that point is i want you to delete that video 

TEREZA: No problem; I was going to replace it with the recording I’m making of this conversation, anyway. 

DAVE: god damn it what the fuck and also why didnt this all knowing piece of shit warn me you were doing that 

The kid’s phone buzzed with the message THERE IS A 95% CHANCE YOU ARE BEING RECORDED BY TEREZA KOCOVA. 

DAVE: well thanks a lot you worthless piece of shit 

DAVE: why dont you try telling me these things ahead of time 

HAYDEN: Dude, how do you think that thing works? 

DAVE: dont sass me for thinking the phone is magic ive seen literally nigh-omniscient beings and am somehow related to some of them if you tell me the phone taps into the primal forces that weave our reality and so literally just knows shit id accept that as credulously as you please 

TEREZA: It scans your environment for various threats and analyzes the clues it picks up. For instance, the fact that I just said I was recording you and that it could tell that I was probably being honest. 

DAVE: great my very own pocket jason bourne that surely isnt sending everything it sees and hears directly to the cia 

TEREZA: Look, I’d explain why that doesn’t happen but I’ve got the feeling I’m teetering dangerously close to being your personal exposition fairy. I’m sure you can find someone way more interested in tech than I am to explain everything you can ever possibly want to know to you. 

DAVE: k but that brings us back to the bit where youre recording me for the second time today and im like dude what is your problem 

TEREZA: Well I mean, this seems like a much less invasive conversation to show Maryam, don’t you think? 

DAVE: k thats fair but at the same time thats a lot of trouble to go through for someone you wont even call by their first name 

TEREZA: Maryam _is_ her first name. Maryam Zanjani. 

DAVE: k that last name sounds like it has at least seven letters so im guessing shes human too 

TEREZA: Of AR extraction, correct. 

DAVE: ar? 

TEREZA: The Arabian Republic. 

DAVE: dont say that like i should know what it is

DAVE: bumpkin from 2009 remember? 

TEREZA: Formerly Saudi Arabia? I could have sworn that had collapsed by two thousand nine. 

DAVE: look when i say the world ended in 2009 i mean that none of this shredded universe shit happened before that date so no troll war no assassination of clinton no balkanization of russia no nothing that resulted from existing in this quaint little pocket universe of yours and i literally know two different trolls with the caste name maryam so excuse me for assuming that the native versions of rose and kanaya settled down and adopted a kid 

DAVE: anyway maryam if youre hearing this dont listen to a word this eastern european spy says we are totally a bunch of clones of humans and trolls that were spliced together human fly style in an experiment by a government hell bent on weaponizing transportalizers k see you bye 

With that the kid leaves. Tereza picks up her phone and ends the recording.

HAYDEN: You might want to use the other recording; Maryam might believe that last bit. 

TEREZA: No, that’s not an option. 

TEREZA: (They were talking about his friend’s issues with their gender.) 

HAYDEN: Tereza! 

You pull back from your friend, who had whispered this last bit in your ear, in revulsion. She is quick to defend herself:

TEREZA: I was going to try to edit that stuff out! Though I admit doing so would have been...difficult. 

You and Tereza meet up with Maryam and Gregor Gorama, a bronzeblood with ramlike horns but which curl in the opposite of the “proper” direction. Maryam, who has been on more than one bigfoot hunt, naturally embraces the transportalizer weaponization plot instantly. 

MARYAM: My God if you could do that you could disappear people with no one suspecting a thing or rewrite their DNA to give them cancer or implant them with false memories or take a scan of their brain and probe it for secrets itjustmakestoomuchsense! 

HAYDEN: E%cept for the fact that it’s impossible. 

GREGOR: .i dunnO .some of these new kids look like they,ve been tuvix,D 

HAYDEN: “Tuvi%’d”? 

GREGOR: ?from _staR treK: voyageR_ season two’ episode twenty-fouR .it,s the one where tuvoK and neeliX are merged in a transporter accident’ hence...tuviX .the name of the episode is also tuviX 

HAYDEN: One: Don’t say that like we should know it. Two: I’ve told you never to utter the name of Neeli% in this house. Three: Tuvi% is added to the list by association, because I know nothing about him but I already hate him. 

You say this, it ought to be pointed out, in the school cafeteria.

TEREZA: Besides, you can’t actually merge like that in a transportalizer. They don’t disassemble and reassemble your atoms, they use folded space to move you from one side of an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the other. 

HAYDEN: Yes, e%actly. 

GREGOR: .i,d also like to state for the record that the name of the film he referenced was _thE flY_ ’ not _humaN flY_ .starring jefF goldbluM 

TEREZA: Speaking of media that was good and not bad, wasn’t he in the original _Jurassic Park_? 

HAYDEN: I prefer the remakes, since the dinosaurs have feathers and all. 

GREGOR: .well that,s hardly the original trilogy,s faulT .they were made in the nineties’ you knoW 

MARYAM: Didnt the third one have those mohawk raptors? 

HAYDEN: Yeah, a transparent attempt to compromise between established mythos and new science, which I did _not_ appreciate. It’s like, shit or get off the pot, you know? 

TEREZA: Can you imagine if they continued the original series and decided to go the other way with it? Stick with the old-style dinosaurs, I mean. 

You shudder at the idea of your favorite movie franchise peddling misinformation about dinosaurs to the general public. 

This conversation continues on in general irrelevance until you’re forced to go to class; afterwards, you notice that you have two new messages on your phone. 

The first is from Dr. Lalonde, apologizing profusely for the misgendering, swearing that she didn’t know. It’s a little much, to be honest, but you accept it in the spirit it was offered. 

The second comes from your contact on Alternia. You listen to the message. 

CONTACT: Lookk. Kidd. Even if I WAS interested in what you could pay me out of your paltry allowance, what you’re asking for is impossiblle. The pre-war net was shut down for a reasonn. Shutting down the whole system was the only way we could find to permanently stop the imperial drones from culling peoplle. The servers are all isolated, impotent, airwalled, and offff. Research into it, even if I was an authorized researcher (which I’m not), is slow due to vicious defenses built into the network, the Union’s paranoia about someone gaining absolute control over the drones or finding an ancient superweapon, and various international disputes going on basically constantly over herre. Long story short, you’re going to have to cut through a lot of red tape or else just wait and hope what you’re looking for gets discovered by someone elsse. 

You swear. You want to hit something, but these Earth lockers were not made to stand up against your distinctly-average-for-a-troll strength, and so you have to keep it bottled up. 

You’re still fuming about it at lunch. 

TEREZA: Yo what’s the deal? 

You play the clip for the whole squad to see. 

TEREZA: Harsh. 

GREGOR: .I mean’ it makes sensE 

MARYAM: Yeah--like he says theres all sorts of boobytraps you need to be careful of and the last thing you want is to awaken an ancient Atlantean supercomputer hell bent on human/troll extermination so its best to take things slow. 

TEREZA: Hey, look on the bright side; maybe the Alternian Union will subdue the whole planet and begin to slowly and cautiously bring that shit back online. To bureaucracy! 

She raises her chocolate milk in an ironic toast as she says this last bit. Everyone joins in, including you, having admitted defeat. For now.

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572780)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told you the chapters would be highly variable in length. And here I am making it longer with this footnote, but a lot happens here. This is our first real look at Two Star!Earth culture and history, where we see our protagonist's quirk for the first time, where we get our Dave cameo (BTW, I know exactly what he and John said, and to avoid you getting disappointed if/when it ever appears explicitly in text, Dave was admonishing John for not thinking about their gender even though June is _right there_ as an example and John admits its because it gives them panic attacks).
> 
> The quirk is subdued--the substitution of a single, relatively rare letter--as befits a troll raised by humans, and the substitution itself was chosen because % is the closest common symbol there is to their sign.
> 
> SBURB tech is in common use, having been studied since the late nineties when Grandpa and Mom, realizing that history had gone _very_ off-course, opened Hellmurder Island to the public. (Since similar ruins exist on Alternia, Maryam's Atlantis theory isn't as non-mainstream as was implied.) As for the political situation, well, if you'll recall how _Forewarned_ ended, there's a lot of chaos in this "universe" but the good guys always win in the end. And I'm sure you can guess who the time travelers who ensure the good guys win are.
> 
> Calliope, in case you hadn't guessed from the incorrect number of trolls and "others" and the explicit lack of anyone with green skin, is using her trollsona. Frankly a lot of people wish she wouldn't, but as has been established she still has issues with her appearance at this point in canon.
> 
> As for why Alternia is the way it is, the Watsonian answer is more or less the reason that was given, plus a number of new states that suddenly had to be concerned with national security and other states spying on their citizens and whatnot. The Doylist answer is that this'd be a real short story if Hayden could google the answers to her questions.


	4. Chapter 4

Once upon a time there had been a petty filibuster kingdom on Alternia. There had been several in fact, but only one is of concern to us. One could be forgiven for thinking that, given the technological and biological superiority trolls had still enjoyed at the end of the Troll War, it was a pretty unlikely thing for trolls to suffer humans bossing them around, political chaos or no, but just as the British found in India, the existence of a native caste system made exploitation _so_ much easier. This petty kingdom managed to survive for decades, but eventually it fell into the crosshairs of the Alternian Union. 

Now, the Alternian Union would _never_ engage in hostile warfare for the purposes of expanding its borders--perish the thought! But if there just so happened to be a resistance movement they could offer aid and comfort and practical military advice and logistical support to, wasn’t it their duty to help them overthrow their cruel masters? And if the new government needed help adjusting to, well, governance, why, it was only right to offer them assistance in that, as well. And if the new state decided in a plebiscite that it wanted to join the Alternian Union, of course it would be accepted! 

No, seriously. The Alternian Union would never engage in hostile warfare for the purposes of expanding its borders. While I deliberately intended that paragraph to be read as sarcastically as possible and the Alternian Union does have the ambition of unifying the world (or even, dare to dream, the worlds) under a single banner and their foreign policy is capable of being as cynical and ruthless as anyone else’s, they’re also pretty close to being the most democratic nation to have ever existed (only various communes and anarchist collectives rank higher) and that fact meant that forcing malcontents to join the Union against their will, thereby giving them the power to help shape said nation’s policies, would be a basic Darwinian error for the young state. 

And throwing their soldiers’ lives away in pointless conflicts not a smart move for the rulers of a democracy--to the point where I dare say any government that does so can’t be all that democratic; to lose the war is certain electoral death, and even victory doesn’t guarantee survival if your opponent can credibly claim they'd have fought the war better. No, the proper way for a democratic nation to run an empire of exploitation is simply to not sanction bad actors--let the local dictators, rich off their business partnerships with your corporations, do the unsightly work of exploiting their people into the ground for the sake of your cheap clothes and iPhones--but even that is unnecessary thanks to Alternia's ubiquitous robotic labor, so a polity like the Union can be quite wholesome in spite of itself. 

But this story is important to us because of what was held within the borders of this petty kingdom, for when the Union’s forensic archeologists combed through the prewar ruins, they found the remains of the Imperial Bureau of Lesser Secrets. Perhaps the petty kingdom had had no idea what they had, or perhaps they’d known and hadn’t cared--the IBLS’s mandate, far from controlling the drones or curating doomsday weapons or even having psyops tactics that could have informed the kingdom’s own, was merely the orwellian editing of media that was retroactively embarrassing. That is to say: if a film were to reference a celebrity who was later unpersoned for insulting the Condesce’s sensibilities in some way, for example, these were the people who would find and remove that reference. Not exactly the sort of thing a filibuster state would care about--they tend not to care about any aspect of troll culture or history that can’t be used to exploit--but a find of significant cultural import to the Union, for included in their files were the unedited originals of the media they censored. 

But I told that story in order to tell this story: That March 3rd, 2028, the the thirty-first anniversary of the day the universe ended and the Troll War began, also known as the 5th of Adar, 5788, also known as 7th Shawwal, 1449, also known on Alternia as the nineteenth bilunar perigee of the fourth dark season’s solstice of what would have been the five thousand two hundred tenth solar sweep of Her Imperious Condesencion’s rule if Her Imperious Condescension still reigned (5210/18/19), was a date that will be forever immortalized in your personal mythology. On that day, the amount of representation limebloods had in prewar media suddenly jumped from “zero” to “a fuckton” and you’ve done nothing but binge watch old Alternian media ever since. 

There comes a knock on your door. You stand, noticing several pains you’ve been ignoring, and walk over to open it, stumbling slightly. 

Tereza barges into your dorm room. 

TEREZA: God it stinks in here. You stink. Have you bathed? Have you eaten? Have you _slept?_

You do, admittedly feel a bit worse for the wear. 

HAYDEN: Did you know that Bhelle from troll _Beauty and the Beast_ was originally a limeblood? 

TEREZA: _I don’t fucking care!_ Do you have _any_ idea how long you’ve been in here? 

You blink. How long _have_ you been shut away in your room? Tereza seems upset. You wonder why. You remember from sex ed class that troll nipples are psychic sensory organs (hence why they were made to project away from the body in the subspecies adapted to hunt); you wonder if you’d be able to get a better read on her if you took your top off. 

HAYDEN: Idunno. Three days? 

TEREZA: Three weeks! 

HAYDEN: Oh. 

TEREZA: At this rate you’re going to flunk out of your classes and drop out of college. Is that what you want, Hayden? 

HAYDEN: Of course not. But there’s just so much stuff here. After so many years of nothing, there’s so much. 

HAYDEN: It’s funny. I can pinpoint more or less the e%act moment when limebloods went from being lauded--at least, in as much as any midblood is--to vilified, at least to within a handful of sweeps. But I haven’t seen a triggering incident, nor is there any pattern to how we’re vilified. Are we street thugs or secret-string-pulling masterminds? Traitors or drug pushers? Am I Shylok or Sampoh--there’s no consistent stereotype. It’s the damnedest thing, like...people knew we were bad, they just didn’t know _why_ we were bad. 

Tereza slaps you. She does it as hard as she can, but because of your troll physiology you barely notice. 

TEREZA: Enough! Enough of this! I’m taking away your computers and cleaning your room and you’re not getting any of your shit back until you’ve slept, showered, ate, and spoken to a minimum of one friend. They’re all worried sick about you, you know. 

Before you can stop her, she’s capchalogued everything in your room that wasn’t nailed down in one big captchabomb, something that could only be done with a highly illegal hacked wallet. You stare in shock. Her hand gestures indicate that she’s combining captchalogue cards, which she can do willy-nilly with her array modus, and then she placed a [not-quite-perfectly made](https://www.homestuck.com/story/58) bed in the middle of the room. 

TEREZA: Now get some sleep. 

HAYDEN: You’re using a hacked wallet! 

TEREZA: Yeah. 

HAYDEN: That’s illegal! 

TEREZA: Yup. 

HAYDEN: You could go to jail! What if people think you’re a terrorist? 

Sylladex technology had become highly regulated once people realized that there was literally no limit, beyond those artificially introduced by Skaianet software, to what could be contained in their weird little pocket dimensions. The idea that a random child could hack their way through the security and captchalogue the whole damn planet, as was now known had happened to the Earth in at least one timeline, had horrified people. (Also, there was another “fun” way to weaponize sylladexes--without the safeguards, there was no reason that you necessarily had to captchalogue _whole_ objects.) 

TEREZA: Tell you what: if you limit your consumption of this media to four hours a day at a maximum, I will throw this sylladex away. Deal? 

You nearly collapse out of sheer relief before being braced with a sudden wave of suspicion. 

HAYDEN: Wait--just like that? 

TEREZA: Just like that. 

HAYDEN: But finding such a thing must have taken a lot of effort and money. And time. 

TEREZA: Do you want to make this deal or what? 

HAYDEN: Yes, of course. It’s just...why would you do that for me? 

TEREZA: Because I love you, you idiot. 

TEREZA: Now I’m going to go sort this crap into stuff to be thrown out and stuff to be cleaned. 

With that, she leaves. You are left dazed. Your brain is too addled from lack of sleep, lack of food, and isolation to process things properly, but in a few days’ time you will realize that you love her too. 

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572795)


	5. Chapter 5

You stand in a classroom in Stanford, which makes sense since that’s where you’re studying for your doctorate. Class is concluded but you stay behind. You approach your archeology teacher.

In the ten years since we last touched on your fashion, it has changed considerably. People know who and what you are, and you embrace it; your hair is its natural shocking white, and atypically for modern trolls you wear your symbol prominently on the front of a plain black shirt. Fortunately, your story utterly pales in comparison to certain classmates of yours who turned out to be responsible for the existence of reality itself more or less, or else you’d never get a moment’s peace.

The professor notices you. There’s no going back now (well, technically you suppose there is, but that’d just make it even harder to try again in the future). You’re not normally this nervous, but what you’re after...well, it’s a big ask. When you don’t speak, she addresses you with that omnipresent grin of hers. 

(ARADIA): do you want something miss kelvin? 

HAYDEN: Y-Yes, Dr. Megido. 

HAYDEN: Have you decided where your ne%t e%pedition will be to? 

(ARADIA): i have a few ideas 

(ARADIA): why? 

HAYDEN: Well I was hoping we could...well, there’s something I want to look into. 

(ARADIA): oh? 

HAYDEN: I want to investigate the disappearance of the limebloods. 

(ARADIA): ive got to be honest, that wasnt on my shortlist 

You slice your palm open and hold the wound up so she can see the lime blood. 

(ARADIA): yes 

(ARADIA): i can see what color the symbol on your shirt is 

HAYDEN: Oh. Well, the point is, this is something that’s been hanging over my head my entire life. There are all sorts of legends about what limebloods were and why we were exterminated, ranging from a predisposition towards anarchy to our powers somehow being a threat to the empire--this in spite of the fact that we clearly existed within the empire for thousands of sweeps without it being an issue, which begs the question of what ch--but I’m distracting myself! 

HAYDEN: Professor, I am the last of my kind, and _I want to know why!_

Professor Megido looks at you, weighing. 

(ARADIA): look 

(ARADIA): the thing is that the next expedition has already been postponed for next year 

(ARADIA): the younger june has a thing she needs to do and i want to be there to support her you see 

(ARADIA): but the point is that that being the case i cant just go bending it around the needs of a single student 

HAYDEN: I see. 

(ARADIA): that being said, ive got a whole spring open after that commitment and we could set up a private expedition :) 

HAYDEN: We can? But what about logistics and funding and approval and--and--and--? 

(ARADIA): well yeah that stuff would normally be problems but whats the point of having the numbers of literal gods if you cant take advantage of it now and again? 

HAYDEN: Oh thank you thank you thank you thank you thank-- 

(ARADIA): easy! remember to breathe! 

You do so. 

(ARADIA): now then 

(ARADIA): can you get to volunteer park in seattle on april 13 

You nod, still remembering to breathe.

(ARADIA): good! 

(ARADIA): contact me by the end of the week with whomever you wish to bring and do so; 

(ARADIA): we’re going to wrangle some gods and other vips to assist us 

You nod again.

(ARADIA): 

(ARADIA): well this conversation has been fun and all but ive got work to do 

(ARADIA): so... 

HAYDEN: Right! Right! I’ll see you there. Thanks again Dr. Megido! 

You run from the classroom and into the arms of Tereza, whom you’ve been going steady with for four years now.

TEREZA: I take it it went well? 

HAYDEN: Yes, it did! Way better than it should have, but as it turns out she wasn’t doing an official e%pedition this year at all because of June’s battle with Lord English or whatever and so since she apparently didn’t have any plans after that she was like “We can go on a private e%pedition, just let me wrangle up a few gods at June’s party.” 

HAYDEN: By the way, stabbing myself in the hand did nothing, so thanks for _that_ advice. 

TEREZA: Hey, you got what you wanted, didn’t you? You have no way of knowing that spilling your own blood wasn’t the thing that separated success from failure. 

HAYDEN: I’m telling you, she was singularly unimpressed by it.... 

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572819)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter contains spoilers for _Duty is Heavier than a Hammer_ \--consider yourself warned.
> 
> In case you're reading this without reading _Forewarned_ or DiHtaH, the (parentheses) mark this Aradia as the one who is native to the Two Star Universe.


	6. Chapter 6

As we already established, by some strange coincidence the 13th of April happens to be your birthday as well as June’s. Today you turn twenty three, and instead of having your own party you attend June’s not-a-party. It’s not that big a sacrifice; you do like parties and all (it’s part of the whole, rich, and fulfilling life you have outside of this quest, which we’ve barely touched on because it’s not relevant to our story), but you’re not a freak about them--besides, the food here’s healthier than what you’d probably be eating today if you had your druthers. 

It occurs to you that you are rubbing elbows with some incalculably important people. Most of the people of your age group here were intimately involved with creation of entire universes, including this one by accident. Among the people not of your age group are some of the worlds’ most powerful politicians: Feferi Peixes, the Napoleonic overlord of the Alternian Union’s single largest party, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, America’s first Socialist (and Latina) president. 

In short, all sorts of notables, and meanwhile you’re just...you. Notable in your own right, perhaps, but not because of anything you’ve actually _done_ , merely for the chance occurrence of having strangely colored blood in your veins. You feel like an exotic zoo animal. 

Not that you intend to let that stop you from talking to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but before you can do so Professor Megido waves you over. 

(ARADIA): feferi has confirmed that her contacts have approved our entry into the alternian union 

(ARADIA): theyre expecting us 

HAYDEN: What, like, right now? How are we going to get there? 

JADE: hey 

HAYDEN: Oh. Hey. 

She awkwardly waves at you and then you awkwardly wave at her in the way of awkward exes. 

TEREZA: So, who else is coming with us? 

(ARADIA): aside from a few local contacts were it 

JADE: shall we go? 

(ARADIA): is everyone here? 

HAYDEN: Yes. 

(ARADIA): then lets 

What the author calls the two star universe is small when compared to, say, a universe, or even a galaxy--minuscule, in fact--but on the human scale, it is quite large. When the two droplets of universe frog gore/spacetime that formed this pocket dimension collided in their orbit around the Green Sun, the result wasn’t that this half of the bubble contains stuff from universe A and that half of the bubble contains stuff from universe B--they _merged_. It was the sort of thing that, had it happened on a small enough scale, could easily see people’s atoms merged with buildings that weren’t there a second ago; this was averted by the mere fact that solar systems and the space around them are largely empty space. The gore chunks had hit each other nearly perfectly dead on, with the result that in a universe three lightyears across in average diameter, the sun and Caedisol are 3000 AU from one another. (This puts them firmly within one another’s Oort clouds--the local meteor showers are nearly spectacular enough to make up for the lack of stars.) 

I bring this up because it means that the distance between Earth and Alternia is just shy of seventeen light-days and eight light-hours, which raises a conundrum whenever Jade uses her powers to “instantly” travel from one to the other because simultinaity does not exist in an Einsteinian universe, so how is it possible to simultaneously disappear from one place and appear in another? 

This is a question that took several months of research and the development of several new technologies to solve, but the answer as it turns out is that whenever Jade uses her powers to cross space she automatically atunes herself to whatever the shortest path for information between those two points is; when calculated against that, her jumps appear to be instantaneous. This hypothesis was proved by having her jump to a probe at the edge of the universe that they knew was three days “behind” earth due to the effects of relativistic travel on its wormhole-based communications system; sure enough, when she disappeared here, she appeared there three days in the past and thus was able to communicate in real time with the present. 

Thus Relativity continues to hang on to a sliver of hope. One would think in a world with both FTL and time travel it’d be a goner, but since those two things are mathematically equivalent, it’s possible that there’s some clever manipulation of the Alcubierre metric with an unknown power source going on here rather than a true violation of Einstein--a hypothesis emboldened by the fact that Jade’s powers are Einstein-compliant. 

Did you need to know all that to know that Jade transports you all safely to Alternia with zero complications in a flash of green light? Probably not, but I thought it was neat. 

You really have no excuse for the sense of awe and wonder you feel at standing on an alien world. This planet has been in constant contact with the Earth since 1997! For fuck’s sake, you were born here! But all the same, never while you’ve been old enough to be aware of it have you left the USA, or even the west coast--and Oregon you’ve only driven through--and now here you are, breathing another world’s air, staring up at another world’s (equally pitch black as your own) night sky. 

LIZBET: h3ll0 all; i am lizb3t saland; i supp0s3 i’m y0ur t0urguid3 t0 alt3rnia 

JADE: lizbet is your government contact and now that ive seen you safely in her hands ill be going 

(ARADIA): yes 

(ARADIA): thank you jade 

Jade nods and disappears in a flash of green light. 

TEREZA: So, you work for Feferi’s List, eh? 

LIZBET: y3ah, but just b3tw33n you and m3, i v0t3 syndicalist 3v3ry sw33p; fl is mainly us3ful as a way t0 trick c0ns3rvativ3s int0 v0ting f0r s0m3thing m0r3 or l3ss pr0gr3ssiv3 

Alternia is a world where the concept of democracy is new, and they’d experimented boldly with it. The Alternian Union was no exception, for its creators had wanted to create a system that was impossible to gerrymander, truly representative of the electorate, and where the people would vote clear-headedly because there would be no parasocial relationships between the voters and their representatives. Thus, the parliament of the Alternian Union isn’t decided by [first-past-the-post](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&t=4s) elections or [instant runoff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE) elections or [single transferable vote](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI) elections or even [mixed-member proportional](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU) elections--instead, they had what they called proportional elections, in which parties submit ranked lists of one thousand candidates (for there are one thousand seats in the parliament) beforehand and the people vote directly for their preferred party, which then get to seat a number of candidates proportional to their vote. 

Controversially, there is no set guideline determining how these parties are selected--parties are free to set their own rules for that in accordance to whatever said party’s political philosophy is. Many are democratic in some way--one popular method was to accept all comers (or have a select committee decide who can run for a position on the list) and instead of having them compete for votes have them face up-down votes of acceptance and their placement in the list being determined by how well they do in that (how approval-vs.-disapproval is weighted against pure name recognition, again, varies from party to party)--but they needn’t be; Feferi’s List, for instance, was literally a list of people chosen by Feferi Peixes. 

Furthermore, parties were allowed to negotiate among themselves for what to do with the odd remainders that inevitably showed up when the number of votes they got weren’t cleanly divisible by one one thousandth of the electorate; to use Feferi’s List as an example again, they had won ~19.277% of the vote and had literally traded much of that “spare” 0.077% to the Syndicalist Party, which had won ~6.425% of the vote, for a number of concessions, meaning the two parties had 192 and 65 seats, respectively. 

This system is sustainable because of the huge number of parties the Alternian Union has--over a hundred, most of which were viable at least in the sense that they tend to sit at least one MP more often than not (many argue that the need for such a large array of parties means that this system would not be viable in any polity with much less than a billion people in it, which has hampered it from catching on). 

The Union is also able to sidestep the issue that codifying parties into law necessitates having a way to determine what a “real” or “legitimate” political party is by simply declaring that any party recognized by any member state was automatically recognized by the Union government for the purposes of Union elections. This of course creates its own issues because some of the more free-speech-fundamentalist states will recognize any party, no matter how fascist, which then complain of being hampered in the election because they’re not legally allowed to run ads in states with stricter hate speech laws--but they haven’t the power to do more than complain. 

The ruling coalitions are massive; the current one includes twenty-two parties, mostly of various flavors of socialist. Feferi’s List is (rather reluctantly, on the part of some of their partners) included for the sake of the 600 seat supermajority. 

The parliament has an amazing amount of power for something that is essentially an EU-style coalition of independent states--even the power to veto the laws of member states--but that was perhaps unsurprising; these states, far from having centuries of culture and history as independent polities, were all less than fifteen sweeps old. 

None of this is passing through your head as a result of what Lizbet said, because that’s not really how people work, but you are generally aware of all of it, in greater or lesser detail, and so perfectly understand the statement she just made. 

TEREZA: Cool beans. So, where to? 

LIZBET: that is up t0 y0u 

She looks at Professor Megido, who looks at you. The decision is in your hands, and finally I get to ask the question: 

What will you do? 

HAYDEN: Well I suppose the first issue is that I don’t know what time of day it is. 

LIZBET: who car3s? it’s th3 s0lstic3 

HAYDEN: By four days! According to the standardized, not natural, seasons! And I don’t know where we are! 

LIZBET: south3rn h3misph3r3, 0bvi0usly 

She points up at the night sky as proof of this. Alternia has an axial tilt of 93 degrees, and according to the date calculator you consulted earlier 13 April 2032 in the Gregorian calendar corresponded to the fourth bilunar perigee of the third light season’s solstice of the five thousand two hundred twelfth solar sweep of Her Imperious Condesencion’s rule if Her Imperious Condescension still reigned, meaning that the sun would be passing over the north pole sometime this “month” (six of these cycles correspond exactly to five of Alternia’s years, due to the procession of the poles being in 6:5 resonance with the year--hence, the length of a solar sweep, being the time it takes these cycles to sync up). 

Relax; the diversion is over. 

HAYDEN: What latitude, smartass. 

LIZBET: fifty d3gr33s; dawn ain’t c0ming f0r a l0ng, l0ng tim3 

HAYDEN: Was that so hard? 

HAYDEN: In that case, I see no reason we can’t just head off to wherever they keep the servers from…the Imperial Agency for Troll Instrumentality and Caste Integration, right? 

(ARADIA): correct 

Lizbet shrugs and leads you all to her buggy. 

You look at your phone to consult the local search engines, and notice that the date readout on your phone has changed from 2032/4/13 to 5212/12/4. For how wacky the names of Alternian temporal units are (legend had it that the Condesce would cull anyone who corrected her misuse of astronomical terminology, but you doubt that was it; once one accepts that a bilunar perigee is when the moons are closest to _each other_ , not to _Alternia_ \--which, no doubt one of Doc Scratch’s little jokes, happens every 24 hours exactly, when the green moon laps the pink moon--the rest is simply naming time spans after the celestial events that define them), the Standard Imperial calendar was actually far more regular than the Gregorian calendar--every “month” was 33 bilunar perigees exactly, minus a “reverse” leap day removed from the first one every odd-numbered sweep or sweep divisible by eight (excepting those divisible by 300)--and was arguably the superior time-keeping system, but having been raised on Earth, specifically in America, in Washington state, it just seems so… 

Well, alien. 

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572834)


	7. Chapter 7

The woman in the chain linked off area is human; you suppose this isn’t _that_ surprising, since humans have been coming to Alternia for as long as trolls have been coming to Earth, but the scars are. 

Two types of humans come to Alternia, filibusters trying to carve out their own petty kingdoms in what is still a lawless place in places and, well, everyone else--the latter tend to stick to the safer areas and the former set themselves up as a ruling class, and either way you’d think she’d have access to advanced enough healthcare where those scars wouldn’t exist. Survivor or child of a lost filibuster, perhaps? Those things had often been spectacular failures, after all (the Robertson Crusade comes to mind), and there were still lost and feral humans out there, surviving (or not) in the Alternian wilderness--but it’s hard to imagine someone who had watched her parents getting killed by trolls and/or other Alternian biota coming to work for the Alternian Union. 

But then, you don’t know her; maybe seeing how cruel the worlds could be taught her compassion? 

The name on her name tag is Kanako Smith. Kanako, you know, is a perfectly valid Japanese name, but she doesn’t look Japanese, and you have a sneaking suspicion that whoever named her did not have Japan in mind when they did so. 

You are filled with sonder as you realize this woman has a rich and complex history you will never know anything about. 

You decide to break the ice with a joke. 

HAYDEN: So y’all got the Ark of the Covenant ’round here or…? 

KANAKO: |\|o, we just do servers. 

HAYDEN: No, see, that was a joke. Because this place looks exactly like the final scene of _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , get it?

KANAKO: |’ve never heard of that show, sorry. 

HAYDEN: It’s a movie. From 1988. 

KANAKO: \/\/ell how am | supposed to get a reference from a movie that’s over three thousand sweeps old? 

HAYDEN: 1988 AD. Gregorian calendar. Earth years. 

KANAKO: \/\/hat’s that in sweeps? 

HAYDEN: I don’t know, they confiscated our syllade%es and electronics before they let us in here. Look, we have real business to get to. 

KANAKO: ¥eah? 

HAYDEN: I have a number of queries to make of official Imperial documentation. 

KANAKO: |)o you have permission to do this? |_ike, | know you probably do. $ince you were allowed in here and everything. |3ut, like, | have to be sure. |°rocedure, you know. 

LIZBET: i hav3 th3 d0cum3ntati0n right h3r3. 

KANAKO: ... 

KANAKO: /\lright, this appears to be in order; come on in. +his was the file index for the |mperial /\gency for +roll |nstrumentality and (aste |ntegration; when you ask your question, it will return an error message, but |’ll be able to see what files it was looking for and consult our own index to retrieve the proper server. 

You nod and approach the computer she gestures you towards and begin to type.

_ Powers of limebloods. _

_[error]_

_ Role of limebloods. _

_[error]_

_ Reason for limeblood extermination. _

_[error]_

KANAKO: +hat it? 

HAYDEN: Yeah. At least until I find out what the answers to those questions are. 

Kanako speaks into her walkie talkie, asking for three servers by callsigns that you don’t catch and that wouldn’t mean anything to you regardless. You settle in to wait. 

It occurs to you that your quest is nearing its completion. You’ve known nothing but years and years of unanswerable questions, and now the answers will be yours as soon as the warehouse workers arrive with your servers. 

The seconds begin to stretch into eternity, but Kanako saves you by striking up a conversation. 

KANAKO: ¥ou’re going to be disappointed, you know. 

HAYDEN: Pardon? 

KANAKO: ¥our little quest for the secrets of the limebloods or whatever. |t’s going to turn out that the (ondesce had a violent breakup with her limeblooded matesprit and all limebloods had to die because they reminded her of him, or some such nonsense. ¥ou’re going to be more disappointed than the ghosts of my parents would be if they could see me now. 

HAYDEN: So people keep telling me. 

KANAKO: |°eople keep telling you my parents are disappointed in them? 

HAYDEN: No, that--oh. Heh. 

HAYDEN: Seriously though, I’ve heard it all before. 

KANAKO: +hen why are you doing this? 

HAYDEN: Because I need to know. It… 

How do you explain this? How can one explain the burning desire for truth to one that does not feel just as passionately about it? Is it any more possible than explaining color to the blind (excepting Terezi Pyrope)?

HAYDEN: On some level, it doesn’t matter whether the reason was farcical or coldly calculated. It only matters that it happened. The truth is…well, it’s the truth, you know? The fact that it’s true matters far more than what it is. Whether it’s good or evil, whether it heals or harms, the truth is the truth. It doesn’t need our consent to exist, it just is. It’s out there, whether we know it or not, whether we consent to it or not, and I would rather know it. 

HAYDEN: Besides, I’ve been studying limebloods in media since the IBLS’s files were made public and came to all my significant conclusions in the first week, which-- 

A troll arrives in a forklift (there are no advanced electronics allowed within these walls except the servers themselves and Kanako’s rig), delivering the servers, and Kanako quickly gets to work setting up the first. She calls up the file; you read: 

_Many limebloods have a passive empathic sense that allows them to understand and manipulate those around them. A few can actively project calm. These traits make limebloods exceptional moirails and auspitices._

After that was a listing of their basically average for a troll levels of strength, endurance, and other physical features, followed by a power chart vaguely reminiscent of the one from Marvel. 

Honestly this isn’t very surprising; this is the most common suite of powers attributed to limebloods in legend, and not particularly absurd when compared to other troll powers. You obviously don’t have the latter power, and you honestly kind of hope that you don’t have the former one, either--if this is what your enhanced ability to understand and empathize with people is like, you’d hate to see what your baseline is! 

Kanako unplugs the server and sets up the next one. You read: 

_Limebloods serve as the great auspitices of society, sussing out and dispelling pockets of revolutionary ferver. They also often serve as moirails to certain highbloods that it would be politically inconvenient to have to cull._

Greater detail is gone into, which you find fascinating of course, but that is the gist of it. From what it looks like, limebloods were quite useful to have around--so what caused the empire to turn against them? 

Final server. Final question. It all has been leading up to this. You begin to read, and… 

_File removed by order of the Imperial Agency for Factual Record Keeping._

Kanako whistles. 

KANAKO: $omething the propagandists didn’t want us to see, eh? +his might actually be interesting. |)on’t worry, |’ll do some forensic shit and find out what used to be here. €ventually. 

LIZBET: and i’ll s33 ab0ut g3tting us acc3ss t0 the iafrk s3rv3rs; writ3 d0wn that string 0f numb3rs; it’ll c0m3 in us3ful wh3n w3 try and track it d0wn th3r3 

You stare at the screen, feeling in your soul that defeat had been snatched from the hands of victory. Professor Megido puts a hand on your shoulder and gives you a sympathetic look.

(ARADIA): lets go get something to eat and see about our living arrangements ok? 

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56572852)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some things I know about Kanako that you do not: (1) Her eyes are not red. (2) She picked that name herself. (3) She has never been to Earth and has no desire to go there. (Tereza's eyes absolutely are grey, BTW.)
> 
> Kanako's quirk is definitely one of my favorite ones I've ever done.


	8. Chapter 8

As you wait for something to happen, you’ve been rewatching some of the key pieces of limeblood media you’ve already watched, seeing what you can suss out with in light of what you know now but didn’t before. 

You record a note into your phone: 

HAYDEN: The fact that Bhelle in troll _Beauty and the Beast_ was originally a limeblood while Adamah is a purpleblood strikes me as significant in light of recent revelations, as I recall that the human version of the story was originally written as an allegory for arranged marriage, and that’s basically what a lot of limebloods had to look forward to, moirailegance-wise. 

HAYDEN: Beyond that, I have nothing to report. It’s just like it always has been: Limebloods are portrayed positively in earlier works, as peacemakers and significant elements in the hero’s support network, though admittedly rarely as heroes in their own right--and then suddenly they’re criminals of no consistent description. It’s the lack of consistency that bugs me: they are everything from drug dealers to traitors, from brainless street toughs to conspiratorial masterminds. There’s no consistent stereotype. It’s...scattershot. Like people knew that limebloods were “bad,” but didn’t know _why_ they were “bad.” But I’m sure I’m repeating myself. 

HAYDEN: 

HAYDEN: *sigh* 

HAYDEN: The thing that gets me is that the general consensus of what limeblood powers were is true, but the consensus of how that constituted a threat to the empire couldn’t be more false. Which makes sense on its own, since there was no way the empire would suffer a threat like that to exist for ten thousand years before doing something about it, but the thing is it turns out that limebloods were actually a pretty damn valuable element in maintaining the social order. So what could possibly have prompted the empire to kill us all off? And why was that rationale later redacted? 

HAYDEN: It seems like every time I get answers in this quest, they just raise more questions. Hopefully we get to the bottom of it soon. 

[==>](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579023/chapters/56575153)


	9. Chapter 9

Your phone rings. 

HAYDEN: Hello? 

KANAKO: ¥o. | managed to dig deep into the system memory and pull something out. $omething kind of weird. 

HAYDEN: Send it to me. 

KANAKO: ¥eah, no. (onnecting anything in here to any network, _especially_ the outside internet, is strictly forbidden. ¥ou’re going to have to come down here. 

HAYDEN: I’m on my way. 

You quickly dress, gather your companions, and leave. Jesus Christ, would it have killed Kanako to be less cryptic? That “something kind of weird” line is going to gnaw at your guts until...well, until you get down there and see what she has, you guess.

Luckily you make it in excellent time and manage to enter Karako’s little cage at the center of the warehouse from _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ before your figurative gut worms kill you. 

(ARADIA): what have you got? 

KANAKO: |_ook. 

You look.

_ > MEMO FROM THE DESK OF THE KAARCIST: _

_ These are the facts as I have come to understand them: _

_ 1) Our methods, no matter how draconian, have completely failed to stem the tide of limeblood criminality. _

_ 2) We have been unable to find a cause for the sudden uptick in limeblood criminality. _

_ 3) Or, for that matter, any connection between the types and severity of crimes committed by limebloods. _

_ 4) Limebloods are too powerful as a caste to be allowed to go rogue like this. _

_ This being the case, I have no choice but to issue a cull-on-sight order on all limebloods, effective immediately. We simply can’t afford this kind of chaos until we get this figured out. _

_ > In the name of Her Imperious Condescension, may it be done. _

You blink. 

TEREZA: Sufferer’s tits. 

HAYDEN: This is...what even is this? 

KANAKO: | said it was weird. 

HAYDEN: This is more than weird--it makes _ no  _ sense. Are you telling me an entire bloodcaste just collectively went apeshit one day? For no apparent reason?

KANAKO: ¥eah. |-|ey, can | come with you to you figure this out? |\|ow that it appears there was some sort of limeblood rage zombie thing going on | am hella curious. 

HAYDEN: It says they have no idea what caused it. 

KANAKO: ()bviously there’s another chapter in this, or else why would this have been covered up? $ociopathic as this memo is, it’s fairly typical |mperial reasoning. (ertainly not the sort of thing anyone would bat an eye at--so why was it hidden? 

KANAKO: |\|o. +hey found the answer, and it was so embarrassing or damaging to the €mpire that they covered it up. +hat’s the only logical explanation. /\nd frankly |’d like to know what it was. 

HAYDEN: Yeah. You’re right. And I’ll be sure to let you tag along when Lizbet gets back to us with those permissions. I mean, if Proffessor Megido agrees. 

(ARADIA): the more the merrier :) 

KANAKO: $weet. 

HAYDEN: I’ll contact you as soon as I have anything. 

It turns out that “as soon as you have anything” meant “as soon as you step out the door,” as when you check your phone you see that Lizbet had attempted to contact you while you were in the warehouse.

LIZBET: y0 it’s m3 and i hav3 n3ws; y0u kn0w h0w i’ve b33n angling t0 g3t y0u acc3ss t0 th3 iafrk? w3ll i’v3 d0n3 it; call m3 as s00n as y0u g3t this m3ssag3 

You snort bemusedly; it never rains but it pours.


	10. Chapter 10

The IAFRK files are kept in a similar warehouse to the IATICI files. The walk down yet another hallway that could have been the location of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark seems to take an eternity. You honestly aren’t even paying attention when Lizbet provides your information to the tech or to anything else that’s going on. A lifetime of questions are about to be answered. Finally you will know the answer to the mystery that has hung over your entire life. Why are you the last? This latest revelation only deepens the mystery, and your thoughts are filled with strange novel viruses and the bizarre machinations of Doc Scratch. Everything is set up. You begin to read. 

_ All references to the reasoning behind the limeblood mass cull are to be removed from the record. The fact that such an event took place may, for the time being, remain, until such time as we decide whether we want to attempt to resurrect the caste or deny it ever existed. _

_ The long and short of it is, our facts were in error. Planetside intelligence agencies began to suspect that something was amiss when they realized that even though limebloods were associated with “crime” in more and more of our data, statistical models of the rates of any given specific crime did not appear to reflect any abnormality, either temporally or when compared to castes of similar affluence such as teals and jades. There was, in short, a general consensus that limebloods were committing crimes, but no specific crime that they were doing an aberrant amount of. _

_ Examining our aggregation methods revealed that the association between limebloods and “crime” came from internet surveillance algorithms, which temporarily got us thinking that there was massive latent revolutionary fervor in the caste that was supposed to keep that sort of thing in check, but again, we realized that that’s not what the data was saying. Limebloods were not associated with any specific action or thoughtcrime, merely with the concept of crime as a whole. Or as it turned out, the word “crime.” _

_ It has been revealed that the sudden massive surge in association between limebloods and the concept of crime was caused by a new meme which contains the line: “Hey, guys! Uh, did you know...that lime...rhymes with crime?” _

You feel your knees give way and Professor Megido has to prop you up. 

HAYDEN: That...that’s _it???_

HAYDEN: We were slaughtered...because of a _meme???_

(ARADIA): did you expect there to be a logical reason for genocide? 

HAYDEN: Well I mean...I guess I don’t know what I e%pected. Just...not _that!_ It’s so... 

(ARADIA): stupid? petty? incompetent? absurd? evil is all of these things my child and the evil of doc scratch is particularly absurd in its vindictive fashion :( im sorry 

Suddenly you double over, laughing and crying.


End file.
